Page 30 of I Hope This Email Finds You in Hell

“As many as you can count on all the fingers of your left hand,” the woman says. Her familiar face transforms into one of quicksilver trickery. She’s not my mom. Of course she’s not. It was a ruse.

“Five days?” I gasp. “I would have been dead in five days?”

“Not dead—happy,” she counters, mischief dancing in her now-black eyes as she takes in Luke with a strange sniff. “You could use some happiness, too, I reckon. Your grief is just as aromatic.”

“Let’s go.” Luke guides me down the aisle. I drop the woman’s handkerchief on the ground and he stomps over it with his boots. Using the cuff of my jacket, I dry my tear-soaked face.

“How did she do that?” I ask Luke, quaking from the interaction. “She looked like my mom. But she—”

“—is a demon,” he finishes as we go through the door at the end of the car and into the in-between section. Before I can push open the door to our car, Luke stops me. “She looked like you, but older. She was preying on your emotions and you almost just made a deal with a demon. A deal that would have had irreversible consequences.”

His voice shakes with barely leashed emotion. Mine is no steadier. “I’m sorry. I—” I break off, unable to finish what I was going to say. I didn’t want to hurt anymore.

As if he heard the words anyway, his tone softens. “That’s what demons do. They trick you by dangling what you want most in front of you. But that’s all it is—a trick.”

“She said she could take all my hurt away,” I say, still feeling the offer’s tantalizing tug. Maybe if I go back, it won’t be too late to take her up on it.

Luke gently grasps my chin, forcing me to meet his urgent eyes. “This is how they work. They lure you in. How do you think she could take it all away? Even the bad is just a branch from the good of the tree. She wouldn’t have just made you forget the hurt, she would have made you forget the love that causes the hurt. And that love is what makes you human. You wouldn’t have died in five days. You would have lost your humanity. That’s even worse.”

“What happens then?” I ask, breaking his hold to wipe my eyes again. Maybe I should be more embarrassed for him to see my tears, but it’s not that which makes me turn away. It’s the intensity of his gaze and, more aptly, the fear. He was afraid for me.

“You can’t go back.” His voice is heavy with the weight of the truth. “Lose your humanity and you won’t be able to pass back into the overworld.”

I shiver. “No deals with demons. Got it.”

“It’s not just demons,” he says. “The longer you’re in hell, the harder it is to leave. Not only because it’s dangerous and the odds of not falling prey to its inhabitants aren’t in your favor. The longer you’re here, the more your being will adapt to the underworld’s conditions to survive. Pieces of your humanity will fall away. And if you’re here too long, you might lose it entirely.”

“So our rescue mission really is on a timer,” I realize. “We need to be in and out before it dings. How long do we have before we go monster mode?”

He frowns, clearly unhappy with the term. “I don’t know. A week if we’re lucky. More than that and it gets dicey.”

“You said we can stay on this train for two days and it should bring us close to Beliar’s lair. Two days there, budget two days for the rescue mission itself, then two days back. Six days. That keeps us within a week.”

He nods reluctantly. “That doesn’t leave much room for error.”

I open the door to our car, glancing at him from over my shoulder. “Then we won’t make any errors.”

Before I can pass through the threshold, Luke grabs my arm. Unlike the woman’s grip, his spreads a comforting heat through me, his pulse palpable through his palm. Or maybe he’s gripping me so hard that it’s my pulse I feel. Either way, I kind of like it.

“You just had to say it, didn’t you?” he asks.

“Say what?”

But then I see what he’s looking at. I jinxed us.

At the back of the car, two massive men perk to attention at our entrance. Grins grow on their faces to reveal jagged teeth with pointed canines. Their ears are tapered as well, seeming to stick up past thick dark hair. If anything’s abundantly clear, it’s that these are not lost souls. Quite the opposite: they look like they’ve found exactly what they’re looking for.

Us.

“Shit,” Luke swears. He’s backing up, taking me with him.

“My bag!”

“We’ll get it,” he assures me. “But we need to lose these guys.”

“Do you know them?” I ask as we shoot through the door we just came from.

“We have a bit of a…past. I thought we’d have longer before they found us. We’re not safe.”